No battery is detected

Note: I know someone will say three years is the normal lifespan for a laptop battery. First, I have rarely used the laptop's battery (it was almost always plugged in). Second, the method of failure is the problem. The computer has NEVER ONCE warned me the battery was anything but in perfect working order; suddenly, one day the computer freaks out, and now it gives an error message suggesting the battery is in fact missing. This is how your batteries die, Dell?

The truth is, this battery garbage, along with the motherboard problem I experienced last year, are well-known and common to Dell laptops. That's why I'm done with Dell. It has nothing to do with the standard lifetime of a laptop battery.

Every night in my dreams, I reenact the Office Space copier scene on every Dell machine I have ever owned. And there have been several, to my embarrassment. Fool me once, shame on you...fool me 3 or 4 times...big time shame on me.

Now let's see if Dell brings down the hammer of censorship on my posts...

While you've made up your mind, the fact is that batteries age, used or not - and a three-year old battery that has been in a system run on AC power almost all the time has been subject to constant heat stress and will have aged to oblivion.

As for "motherboard problem I experienced last year, are well-known and common to Dell laptop", the only one that's well known is the propensity of nVidia's graphics chips in these models to fail - and that's shared by ALL manufacturers' systems that use these chips.